“Oh, come on.”
“I’m just trying to consider all the possibilities–”
“
Querida.
I’ve pissed some people off in my time, but I don’t have
enemies
.”
She blinked. “We all have enemies, Javier.”
He had a feeling he knew where this was going.
“He was wrong, you know,” she said. “The puppet.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you, or your children.”
“Xavier’s yours, too, you know.”
Amy lay her palm flat over the twitching muscle. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know. That’s why I’m not going to let anybody hurt him. Or you.”
Javier didn’t like the look in her eyes. He’d seen it before. When Portia was wearing her face.
“This doesn’t have to get bad,” he said. “You don’t have to hunt these people down, or anything. You don’t have to strike back.”
She turned to him. In the dark, her eyes seemed to glow. “They came to our home,” she said. “Where your children sleep.”
Our
children, he wanted to say, but didn’t. “You don’t even know who
they
are,” he said instead.
“Not yet,” she said. “But I’ll find out.”
“And then what?”
Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on what they do next.”
He crossed the distance between them. He held her face in his hands. “Don’t do this,” he whispered. “Don’t go down this road. It was just surveillance. It’s probably some next-level paparazzi bullshit. We live with that every day. There’s no need to be angry.”
“I’m already angry.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m already so much more angry than you can ever understand.”
“They didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m not angry about
this
,” she said, stepping away. “I’m angry about
everything
.”
“You won,” Javier said. “We’re not on the run, anymore. We’re not in prison. Portia’s gone.”
Amy was silent. Javier simulated many different ways of framing his next question. He chose the simplest.
“She is gone, right?”
Amy shut her eyes. “It’s not that easy. Quarantining Portia, hacking you. It’s not that easy.”
“You keep saying that, but you never actually explain what you mean.”
She lifted her gaze to meet his. “Do you understand what happened to me, when I remade myself?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. I know what you told me, anyway.”
“Well, I didn’t tell you everything. I couldn’t. Because it’s impossible to express. I saw
everything
, Javier. Everything Portia had ever seen. Everything the island ever saw. Everything they ever did. All the memories.”
He held his hands open for her to take, if she wanted to. “What are you saying?”
She looked deeply, terribly, inconsolably sad. “It means that if I change you – hack you, remake you, however you want to think of it – I would see everything you’ve ever done, too.” She bit her lip. “And everyone you’d ever done it with, too.”
He took a step back. He didn’t want to say the next part. “And I’m guessing that’s just a bit too much to ask of you, isn’t it?”
Her programming allowed for a shift in her shoulders that looked an awful lot like a deep sigh. “Right now, it is,” she said. “Maybe later, I’ll be more… grown-up, about the whole thing.”
“Right. Grown-up.” He nodded. How strange, he thought, that his favourite killer robot should be rendered so stupidly and pitiably human by something so organic and predictable as jealousy. He turned away, and found the fresh air whistling into the sub through the hole in its reeking flesh. He let the rain spatter his face before speaking. “Come on. The shipment will be here any minute.”
Actually, the shipment arrived hours behind schedule. It was fully night by the time it showed. They didn’t contact the island in any way to let them know that they’d be late. Amy’s calm grew increasingly brittle as the hours wore on and the shadows lengthened. In that regard, she was not much different from the islanders she’d pulsed. It didn’t take sophisticated affect detection algorithms to understand that the other vN were worried and suspicious. It just took eyes. The others didn’t seem to want to meet his.
By nightfall, Javier had gathered his produce, and gotten himself into a new white shirt and trousers. They were one hundred percent organic plant material, no synthetics. Even the buttons were some sort of pressed cork or balsa or somesuch. He liked the outfit a great deal. He had a thing for cotton.
“You always wear such tight pants when the humans come visit.”
He turned to Amy. She’d changed, too: she wore a pure black skinsuit. It moved sluggishly across her figure, twinkling occasionally. The twinkles had nothing to do with ambient light, and everything to do with where Javier’s gaze alighted on Amy’s body. The suit’s eyes followed his own. He wondered vaguely if he could start selling lengths of the island’s pelt for humans to wear, too. It fit her like a glove.
“Sex sells,” he said.
Amy opened her mouth to say something more, but the high hum of the steaders’ boat cut her off. It was a little solar foil that hopped and bounced on the waves. Its fan sounded like a whole forest of cicadas. It towed a Zodiac bearing a precarious load of boxes tied down with twine. Javier spotted three humans on the foil: two men and one woman. He recognized only two of them. The group of vN rode behind them. All were huge. All were iterating.
“What kept you?” he asked, when the foil pulled up at the island.
The humans’ gaze shifted from him to Amy. The colour of their boxes they carried was hard to tell in the violet light she’d rigged up. She had copied the design of sunflowers that lit up a playground where she and Javier once played in a sandbox. He pretended not to notice this little detail, but he liked that she remembered all the same. Then as now, the light made it easier to see movement and affect rather than pigment.
“We caught your little show,” Tyler said.
Tyler was the one they usually dealt with. He was what other humans occasionally called a “trustafarian,” whatever that meant. His parents were American diplomats. He’d lost them in some revolution in some country where the native population thought of vN as some kind of unnatural evil and refused to let them past the border. No vN, no vN security forces, no peaceful transition. Tyler had some issues with mainland governments, after that. He’d gotten drunk and told Javier all this, a few months ago, when he discovered how good Javier’s peppers were for homemade
gochujang
. Amy made sure to hustle him off before it became a come-on. It was cute, how jealous she got.
“Oh, you mean the worm,” Amy said. “We’re still not sure where it came from.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Tyler said. “Apparently you riled up whoever’s watching those botflies.”
“The fucking Coast Guard showed up,” Simone said.
Simone was Tyler’s partner on these missions. Menopause was not treating her very kindly, and it manifested in a constant scowl that Javier nonetheless found endearingly steely.
“They wouldn’t let us complete the shipment without sending a representative,” she continued. “We had to take on ballast.” She jerked her head back behind her.
From the shadows emerged a black man in his forties. He was about six feet tall with ankles too slim for the broad span of his shoulders. He’d shaved his head. He wore a priest’s collar. When his hand touched Javier’s, every Turing process in him fired at once.
“I’m Pastor Mitch Powell,” he said. “New Eden Ministries.”
4:
Mr Self-Destruct
That night, Amy sealed off their room entirely before undressing. She did so completely, letting the skinsuit drip down her legs and settle into the floor before joining him on the bed. She stretched out beside him and pressed herself against his back.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Everything.”
“That’s a bit much.” He took her hand. “Be more specific.”
“I’m sorry…” She dug her forehead between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry that we have to live with stuff like this. I’m sorry that things like the sub show up. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. You wouldn’t have to if you didn’t live here.”
“I doubt I’d be any better off anywhere else.”
“Sure you would be. You’re great at being by yourself.”
He rolled over and found her eyes in the dark. “I don’t want to be by myself.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Hey, here’s a question.” He rested his head on his arm. He had no idea why he was asking this, after a day like the one they’d just had. It was obvious where her head was at. But the idea had germinated inside him and now he had to run it to its inevitable conclusion, whatever that turned out to be. “You think that preacherman could marry us? We’re definitely of his flock. He’s probably got a service in his missal.”
“His
missal
?”
“Whatever it’s called. The thing with all the ceremonies in it.”
“A reader?”
“No. The document. You know what I mean.” His right hand found her left. “Interested?”
Her fingers enlaced with his. “If you are,” she said. “I don’t need a ceremony, though. And even if I did, I wouldn’t need a human to perform it.” She squeezed his hand. “Besides, we’d have to invite my dad, and he’d have to get time off, and then we’d have to move the island closer to shore, and–”
“OK, OK, I get it.” He let her hand slip away. “I just thought it might be nice.”
She cuddled into his chest. “It
would
be nice. But if that’s what you want, there’s no reason to wait for a human to approve of it.”
He inhaled the scent of her scalp. She smelled like ozone, like storms and rust and burnt sugar. “You don’t play fair,” he said, “turning down my proposal while you’re naked.”
Her head poked up. “I didn’t turn you down,” she said. “I just like doing things my own way. I never went to church, and I’m not going to start with some organization that built us to serve perverts.”
“So, we should wait for a Unitarian to show up?”
Amy rolled away. “No,” she said. “I’m saying we don’t need anything like that. We chose each other already. If you want to have a party for it, that’s fine. But you know it’ll just turn into some big media circus. They’ll stream it everywhere, on every feed. It won’t belong to us anymore.”
She had a point, and it was one he hadn’t considered. He’d been focused on his own private simulation of just how exactly he would slip the white silk up Amy’s legs, just what he’d say, just how it would all go down. So to speak.
“It’s OK,” he heard himself say. “I think I just wanted the wedding night, anyway.”
“… Oh.”
Instantly, he realized he’d made a mistake. She thought it was all about the sex. Usually he was better at planning these things out a few moves in advance. You didn’t sleep your way out of a Nicaraguan prison without being able to do that. But Amy was different. Just organic enough to make him yearn, just synthetic enough to make him slip. And that made moments like this one interminable. Amy folded her knees to her chest and hugged them. She focused on the shadows of the room. Her fingers danced across her shins.
“It’s not just that,” he said. “I want more than that.”
“It’s OK.”
It wasn’t. “No, it’s not.”
“No, really. It’s fine.” Her fingers fluttered like pale night moths. “Like you said. I’ve been holding out on you.”
Oh, Jesus. Shit.
Puta madre.
The conversation was slipping away from him.
She
was slipping away from him.
“It’s not like that,” he said. “That’s not why I brought it up.”
“I should take it as a compliment,” Amy said. “It
is
a compliment, right?”
“It’s a compliment I want to spend the rest of my life giving you.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” She stood. “I have to go look at the sub, now.”
Fuck. He’d lost. She was being graceful about it, but that much was obvious. Her clothes climbed up her body, vine-like and dark enough that she seemed to be slowly disappearing from the room. At the end, only her face remained. Her face was frowning, but not at him. She was talking with the island. In losing the plot, he’d lost her attention, too. She was already unsealing the room. She paused at the entry, hand on the jamb, peering over her shoulder at him.
“Do the words
generation ship
mean anything to you?” she asked.
He said no, and she drifted away. He was watching the darkness where she’d been when Pastor Powell showed up.
“I can’t sleep,” he said.
“This is some place you’ve got, here.”
They were proceeding along the thoroughfare. The night after a shipment was always animated; everybody trying on or trying out whatever came from the boat, showing off their new wares to neighbours and botflies. Small iterations ran past them with pinwheels and fireworks and glowing projector bangles. Rickshaws were out with samples of all the latest pre-fab foods, sent from all the best brands. Lantern bots dipped and hovered, casting mood lighting based on aggregate emotional data gleaned from ambient conversational keywords. And when the other vN noticed the human walking at Javier’s side, they stopped everything to watch him pass.
“Yeah,” Javier said. “It’s something.”
“Forgive an old preacher for prying,” Powell said, “but you don’t seem as enthused as the others. Are you worried about something?”
Yes, he was. But he wasn’t about to tell Powell what it was. So he picked another niggling doubt at the back of his mind.
“The cats,” he said. “In the children’s section. Where the orphans live. I’m worried about the big cats there. My grandson told me they’d been acting up.”
“Your grandson?” Powell’s lips turned down. “I’m jealous. None of my kids has managed to get that far.”
“You’ve got kids?”
Powell nodded. “I don’t see them very much, anymore, though. My wife and I…” He shrugged. “I couldn’t be the man she deserved.”
“Because you enjoy fucking other men?” Javier asked.
Powell stopped short. He said nothing. He didn’t even look at Javier. “That obvious, huh?”
“It’s OK. We’re built to sense these things better than humans can.” He jammed his hands in his pockets. “And as for grandkids, don’t feel bad. Human kids are really tough. They’re intimidating. You’re stuck with them for a long time.”
“If you get to keep them,” Powell said.
Javier nodded. “I’m just saying, our kids are easier. They grow faster. It’s not so much of an investment.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Powell said. “They seem like their own challenge.”
Javier walked through a game of hopscotch where the tiles of the game yelped and squeaked and giggled as he stepped on them. The vN playing were no more than a few months old, but they were all adult sized. Each of them paused as he and Powell drifted through the game. Powell even took the time to pick up an old USB key and toss it across the squares, hopping on one foot to his target and triggering all sorts of shouts and screams. When he finished, the vN clapped.
Javier laughed. It felt good. He hadn’t laughed all day, he realized. Maybe not all week.
“I fucked up the last square.” Powell’s lips made a little “o” shape. “Yes, Javier. We preachers can cuss.”
“Oh, I know you can,” Javier said, before he could think. “I fucked a divinity student before coming here. I know the kind of swear words you all can use.”
His lips clamped shut immediately. The pastor didn’t look embarrassed, just bemused. But Javier was embarrassed. First Amy, now this. The words just kept bleeding out of him. Beside him, Powell slowed to a stop under a tree flush with blue solar leaves.
“Are you trying to confess to me?” he asked. “Because you can, if you want to. Our ministry has a lot of room for that kind of thing. It’s not exactly a sacrament, as such, but we recognize the importance of sharing our truth.”
He leaned up against the tree. He saw Powell do the same. The other man seemed a lot closer than he had before. The heat came off him in damp waves. He was sweating. He smelled of bay rum. He envied that, in organic men. They could wear things that made them smell better, or at least different. He’d heard of vN-friendly colognes, but they all just smelled like new cars.
“Could you marry me to Amy?”
“If that was what you both wanted.”
“What about baptism?”
Powell smiled with only one corner of his mouth. “You want me to take you to the water, Javier? Give you a good dunking?”
“I was just asking.”
“I can baptize you, yes. You or your children, or your grandson.” Powell leaned forward. “You know, you don’t have to be suspicious of me. Unlike the majority of organics, I do believe that you have a soul worth saving.”
“I’m not suspicious of you,” Javier said. “What makes you think I’m suspicious of you?”
“The way you’re looking at me, right now.”
“That’s not suspicion,” Javier said. “That’s how a vN looks at a human being.”
“Quiet. We’re not supposed to be here.”
At night, the Veldt was even more like a fairyland. It was not totally dark, and not totally silent. Being something of a night owl herself, Amy had designed it with the goal of relaxation, not enforced rest. Hammocks hung from the gentle curves of counterfeit oaks, and the trees themselves rocked gently in a programmed breeze. Young iterations, most of them missing shirts or pants or even just one sock, slept in the soft grass or the swaying boughs or in the room-sized clusters of roots beneath the big trees. They piled up together like puppies, or splayed out all alone on the banks of gurgling creeks. They were like lambs, Javier realized. Tiny, human-shaped lambs asleep in the pasture.
“Have you ever read any JM Barrie?” Powell whispered.
“No,” Javier said.
“This is just like Never Never Land,” Powell said, like that meant something.
“We’re just looking for the cats,” Javier said. “We get in, take a look, and get out.”
He didn’t know why he hadn’t told Powell to wait at the edges of the Orphanage. If Amy found out, he’d be so over the line with her that it would be a dot to him. And really, this was her problem. He should have approached her with it. Should have said something. Only something terrible seemed to happen when he said something, these days. It always went so wrong.
So he was sharing this little night reconnaissance with Powell. Powell, the stranger. Powell, the human. Powell, the one reporting on all their activities, so he could “smooth things over.”
“Is that one of them?”
Javier followed the line of Powell’s finger. There, between two intertwined trees, a lioness-shaped ani-mech padded into a clearing. Then another lioness joined it. And another. Jesus. José was right. They
were
getting together. Though maybe it was nothing; Amy had copied her synthetic cats from organic ones, and lionesses were supposed to enjoy hanging out. They just tended to do it while protecting their young. Which was why Amy had built them in the first place – to protect the young.
“I just have to check this out,” Javier said, and sprang.
He landed in the middle parts of the nearest intertwined tree. He gripped it with all his limbs, and edged around it carefully. Then he walked out on one of the boughs. Like most of the trees on the island, it was helpfully designed to fit the width of his foot. Amy again. Never missed a trick.
Below his feet, the lionesses were seated in a circle. They made no noise. They flicked no ears or tails or paws. They remained simply and completely still. Except for the eyes. The eyes – huge and green, almost cartoon-like – blinked slowly. Sometimes they stayed closed for a second or two, and sometimes they blinked more normally. A single cat always did the blinking. They took turns. There were six of them. It was like a nature special, only there was no blood.
Then Powell entered the ring.
He moved quietly, but not quietly enough, and as his shadow crossed the clearing the lionesses turned as one to stare at him. Their ears pricked. Their tails swished. Their mouths opened. And then they pounced.
Javier’s vision pixelated almost immediately. One moment he was full retina display, the next he was full Famicom. It was as though his senses wanted to split up the suffering into small, manageable pieces. He saw the violence play out in low-res, kludgy machine vision. The lions were attacking Powell. Powell was struggling. He was cursing and kicking trying to roll onto his back. It was the best way to protect his stomach from the lions’ back paws. They were trying to disembowel him.
If Javier didn’t stop them, he would failsafe and die.
He jumped down out of the tree and into the pile of snarling flesh. The cats squeaked beneath him, all fibreglass fur and gleaming teeth, their green eyes – Amy’s eyes, Portia’s eyes – made mostly black with pupil. Javier body-checked one of them off Powell and fell on top of him.
“I’m sorry,” Powell said. “I thought–”
“Sh-shut up and get on your b-belly.”
Beneath him, Powell twisted. Teeth clamped onto Javier’s neck. Then claws. He jabbed the lion with one elbow. It refused to let go. He jabbed harder. Claws raked his thighs. His vision darkened, blurred. He slipped his hands under Powell’s squeezing ribs and hugged him, hard.